Читать книгу Vienna - Nick S. Thomas - Страница 13

Herbert set a brisk pace out of the hotel, and across the forecourt to the street.

“I think I remember seeing a café over there, on the right-hand side. Yes, there it is. Shall we try it?”

Mickey shrugged and nodded. Anywhere that sold alcohol was fine with him.

The place was unappealing on the outside and unwelcoming within. One customer sat reading a newspaper at the far end of a line of tables, another two leaned on the bar by the door, in gentle conversation with what looked like a team of husband and wife behind it. Apart from these five, and now the two Englishmen, it was empty.

“Nice and quiet,” said Herbert. “Well, it’s early yet.”

They made their way at random to a table half way along the wall, followed at a respectful distance by the female half of the partnership, who contrived to reach them just as they sat down. Herbert ordered two large beers, and smiled at her as she went away. Then he said;

“Funny place.”

“Why?”

“Oh . . . Lack of atmosphere. It really shouldn’t be empty at this time of day. I think it must have opened recently. Look, everything’s new. No wear on the furniture, no stains on the carpet, or the tables. Let me see . . . Prints of old Vienna, piped music. The furniture’s not exactly plush, though, is it? I’d say they’re trying to catch the locals and the tourists, and they’ve fallen in between. It doesn’t feel very Viennese, somehow. It feels sort of uneasy. Ah, here comes the beer. I think we’ll pay as we go, English style. We’re not staying.”

“You’ve been away a long time, you know. Things might have changed.”

Herbert counted half a dozen coins onto the small tin tray, and waved away the change. Then he said;

“Oh, indeed. I did look in on a couple of places this afternoon, though. The café Eiles on the Ring, and the café Mozart, not the famous one, another one just along the street here. That was very much the old style. No. I’ll ask the girl when she comes back. Bet you the next round the place has been open less than a month.”

“I was rather under the impression that this was your treat.”

“Really? Extraordinary notion.”

They laughed together, and Mickey looked past his father, distracted by a flicker in the mirrored wall at the back. Another single customer had come in, and now hesitated by the bar before sitting down, uneasily, near the door.

“You might not be such a great detective,” said Mickey. “Looks like the place is filling up.”

Without moving his head, Herbert glanced over his son’s shoulder, towards the bar.

“Him? He was in the dining room at the hotel. He must have followed us. No don’t look round. You’ll embarrass him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“But why?”

“Don’t look so alarmed, dear boy. He’s not a deadly enemy out of my shady past. Too young, for one thing. He’s probably on his own, decided to tag along. I expect he’ll work up the courage to introduce himself when he’s had a couple.”

Mickey smiled, and relaxed.

“Your shady past, of course. I should have known better than to take that bet. I keep forgetting you were a spy.”

“Only in the war, with the resistance groups. That’s not what people mean by spying these days. Perhaps one does have a heightened sense. I don’t know.”

“Not a lot seems to get past you, anyway.”

“That may be true. Well then . . . do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“Of course, you might not want to talk, but I thought perhaps you just didn’t want to talk, you know, over dinner. Was it something to do with the exhibition?”

Mickey hesitated, torn between gratitude and anger. Should he own up? This could be his chance to fill in the missing piece, and it might not come again, yet he had deliberately avoided it for his father’s sake. Part of him said that if the old man wanted to rob his son of the grown-up dignity conferred by compassion, then he could take what was coming to him; but it was no better to surrender than to be beaten. He looked for guidance into his father’s face, and found only the fear of rejection.

“All right, Dad, you win. Yes, I did find the exhibition upsetting, and I thought you would as well, so I decided not to tell you about it. How did you work it out?”

“It was pretty obvious, I’m afraid. What really gave you away was . . . Forgive me, this is going to sound rather unkind. While Elspeth was talking about what a waste of effort it had been, it occurred to me that it was the first time I had ever heard her voice a criticism. I take it there was a difference of opinion.”

Mickey looked down again. The partial truth on which he had compromised, which he had hoped would satisfy, had proved inadequate. Now he must add disloyalty to the lie. He said;

“She didn’t seem to be as sensitive to it as she might have been.” Alas, this was also part of the truth.

“Well, don’t be too hard on her, Mickey. She’s a super girl, you know, but she’s very young in some ways.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, you don’t have to worry about me. I don’t want to go and see the thing.”

“No? Why not?”

“Hard to explain. As I said, I did a bit of wandering around town this afternoon, trying to ginger up the memory, I suppose. Looking for things I remembered, things I’d forgotten. It didn’t work. You see, even if the city were exactly the same, even with the same people in the same places, I would still be forty or fifty years older. I have changed, so the way I see it, sense it, that’s changed as well. It’s crazy, I know, but the memories I do have are so different. You lose all the detail, for a start, over the years, you only remember the things that mattered, or still matter. But even the smell of the air, the quality of the light, and the sound . . . My senses have changed. I’m an old man, and there it is. Nothing to be done about it. But somehow I feel that going to that exhibition would be worse, you know? To see a time I lived through stuck in a glass case, like something out of the pyramids.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I thought it was rather strange, in that way. After all, it’s not that long ago.”

“Long enough. I’m sure most people in Europe think of the time before the war as pre-history. And I don’t suppose many of them remember that Austria had an entirely home-grown fascism that was nothing to do with the Nazis. It was all overshadowed by what happened afterwards.”

“Oh yes. I wouldn’t have known, and neither would Elspeth. Actually there’s something I wanted to ask you, about that exhibition.”

“Yes?”

“There was this mock-up of a building, whopping great thing with an archway in the middle, and balconies up the front, and no explanation attached. It seemed to be important in some way.”

“Oh God yes. The Karl-Marx-Hof. Whopping great thing, as you say. The Karl-Marx-Hof was part of the pride of Viennese socialism, enormous block of workers’ flats, put up after the first war. When I was here first there was a popular myth that the place was bursting with weapons, ready for the coming revolution, comrades. In fact it wasn’t quite like that, although I believe there were a few guns hidden in the walls, and the cellar. Anyway, when the balloon went up that February, a lot of the Schutzbund people holed up in there, and promptly found themselves under siege. Then the other side brought up the artillery, and shelled the place point blank.”

“Bloody hell!”

“Yes, the buggers. Quite unnecessary. The poor sods on the inside were hopelessly outnumbered, under-equipped, cut off, and half of them didn’t want to fight anyway, they just lived there. But it was a symbol, you see, for a lot of them in the Heimwehr, and the government. It stood for the red menace. Well, naming it after Karl Marx was a trifle tactless.”

“And were you involved in that?”

“Not really. I went down there looking for someone, and got knocked flat by something going off behind me, probably just a squib of a home-made bomb. But I had a couple of friends who knew what they were doing, and they bundled me over the border and out. That was it.”

Mickey nodded slowly. The danger had passed, and he decided he had been right to let it go. Although the frustration lingered, he was sure now that he was getting there, bit by bit.

“Well. Another chapter. You’ve never told me about that.”

“Haven’t I? Well, it wasn’t a terribly glorious episode, from my point of view.”

“Still interesting, though, for me.”

“Oh, well I’m glad. All rather gloomy, though, isn’t it? Rather like this place. Shall we leave these people to their seance, and take a walk to the bright lights? I think we’ll find the beer’s the same everywhere.”

“Why not.”

At the door of the café Herbert paused to exchange a few words with the woman who had served them. The man who had followed them there stayed where he was, absorbed in an English language magazine. After a moment, Herbert again joined Mickey in the street, grinning in triumph.

“The next one’s on you,” he said. “They’ve been open three weeks.”

It was dark now, but not cold, and they walked at an easy pace as Herbert led the way down the hill and left, with apparent purpose, into a side street. There were surprisingly few people abroad, and the eye drifted naturally to the darkened heights of the buildings that faced one other intimately from each side. To Mickey the uniform antiquity of the stone frontage was almost oppressive.

“Is it still different?”

His father looked about him briefly, and said;

“No. It’s still the same. And I’m still different.”

“Yes, sorry, that’s really what I meant. It’s not coming back, then.”

“No, I don’t know what could do that, unless I get roaring drunk, and forget how old I am. You know I remember it was like this, once, when I went back to the school for some sort of old boys’ do, maybe, fifteen years after I left. After the war, certainly. Miserable occasion, actually. Half my year seemed to have copped it somewhere along the way. Anyway, I remember standing there in the house room, trying desperately to conjure up, you know, what it had felt like, to be part of the place. I wanted to squeeze into one of those desk and flap-seat combination jobs and pretend I was a boy again. They didn’t have those in your time, did they? But it was all wrong, somehow. Couldn’t do it. Do you go back much?”

“Never.”

“Really? I expect they’ll be trying to screw some cash out of you before long. Funny thing was, though, the last time I was there with you, just before you left, what, ten years ago, I did sort of feel something. You know, all the new blocks were up by then, and they’d got rid of the green paint, and brought in those awful white boards with the felt pens . . . Changed out of all recognition, in other words. But somehow, being there with you, watching you and your friends in the Upper Sixth swanning around as if you owned the place—as one does—it brought it all back. Just for a moment, but strong enough to make me feel that it was all still there, deep down. Very reassuring, that.”

“I’ll have to try it.”

“Would you send a boy of yours to the old place, if you had one?”

“Don’t see why not. It’s still in the first division, academically. And Grandpa’s portrait in Big School would be quite a selling point. If it keeps on growing they’ll probably name a house after you one day.”

“Ah, wouldn’t that be grand!”

Mickey winced. He did not consider his school days to have been the happiest of his life, preferring to hope that those were still to come. Certainly belonging to Christie House would not have improved the experience.

“You’re very chatty this evening,” he said.

“Am I?”

“Yes. Much better than this morning. You seem very relaxed.”

“Ha. Hardly. I’m rather on edge, as a matter of fact. Probably why I’m rabbiting on like this. Ah, there. That looks all right.”

They had emerged now, from another winding gorge of a street, into a broad three-way junction dominated by the picture windows of a café on a corner. Herbert led the way across the road and through the door, and at once Mickey realised that the first café had indeed been obviously new. It wasn’t just that this second stop was full of people, and bore the stamp of haphazard cleaning. It was the smell. The sudden rush of coffee and smoke and old beer gave the place its long-lived-in feel, unassisted by warmth or comfort, but enhanced by the chilly grime. They secured a table with hard benches fixed on either side, and Mickey parroted their order to the waiter, who went away smirking.

“He knows we’re English,” said Herbert.

“Yes, I can see that must be incredibly amusing.”

“Oh, don’t take it personally. They’re very hospitable people, you know, they like foreigners, especially the English. Waiters get a bit of harmless fun out of spotting the accents, that’s all.”

“I suppose. So why are you on edge? Anything special?”

“Nothing you can’t work out for yourself.”

“Wolf’s legacy.”

“Yes . . . I don’t quite know what to expect. I’ve been trying to remember . . . Ah, more beer. Have you got forty Schillings?”

“Somewhere.”

“Don’t forget the tip.”

“Must I?”

“Oh yes, always.”

Mickey paid up with the best grace he could muster, and the waiter bowed from the neck as he filed the money in an excessively subdivided wallet. Mickey took a long pull at his beer. Like everything else in this city, the glass was a mild but disconcerting distortion of its English counterpart. Daily life here could make you sea-sick, like wearing strong lenses for the first time.

“You were saying.”

“Was I? Oh, well it’s just that I can’t remember anything that will give us a clue. I got a few odd things in the post, months after I got back to England. It’s certainly not the whole estate, you see, that was all taken care of at the time. Fifty years . . . It must be letters, I suppose. Stuff about people who are all dead, memoirs perhaps. I just don’t know.”

Mickey took a breath, and said;

“So what do you remember?”

His father sat back suddenly, and stared at the ceiling for what seemed to be a very long time.

“The cold,” he said.

“The cold?”

“It was absolutely freezing all the time I was here. It gets like that, you know. Something to do with being in the middle of a continent. I know it was boiling when I was here in ’45. I know it was, but I don’t remember . . . But I do remember the cold. That stayed with me, for some reason. You know, years afterwards I used to wake up, sometimes, shivering like hell, convinced that I was back here, freezing to death, and start grabbing blankets like a madman. It happened in Malaya, once. Everyone thought I’d got malaria, but I was just cold, chilled to the bone, in the middle of all that. Crazy.”

“Amazing what the mind can do, isn’t it?”

“Yes, remarkable. Gives me the creeps, actually.”

“And you know, even in Malaya, if you hadn’t woken up and thawed out in front of the fire or whatever, you might have died of exposure.”

“What a happy thought. Well, it certainly wasn’t an illusion. I mean all the chaps were sweating like pigs, standing around squeezing my hands as though I was the risen Christ. They couldn’t believe there was nothing wrong with me. But I just bolted a mug of boiling tea, and then I was all right again. I really needed that tea. Still, you’re right, of course. The mind can do some very peculiar things.”

“Elspeth would have sent you to an analyst.”

“Don’t be too hard on Elspeth . . . Gosh, you know what? I’m not used to this stuff. I think I’m getting a bit squiffy. Disgraceful at my age.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“No, I want some more beer. My round. Herr Ober!”

Mickey felt his spirits sink. Two pints, or half-litres of the smooth, gassy beer was feeling like just enough. He wanted to go to bed. The headache had come back, and his legs felt as though they had been standing in cold mud all afternoon. Now, instead of losing himself in sleep and the soft warmth of his wife, he must sit in this unfriendly place and watch his father get drunk, and hope that secrets would emerge from the talk to make it worthwhile.

But there was another option. He sat forward, resolutely drained his glass, and told his body to find second or third wind.

“Do you think they’d have Scotch here?” he said.

“Yes, I expect so. Probably costs the earth. Never mind.”

The drinks arrived quickly, and Mickey knocked back the Scotch in one and lit a cigarette. The effect was immediate. Whisky was the magic ingredient in the evening’s formula. Gin, Mosel, claret, brandy, beer, now whisky and more beer. The die was cast.

“You know you could have cheated on that bet,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known the difference.”

“Don’t you know even that much German?”

Mickey sat back, and considered.

“I’ll tell you how much German I know,” he said. “I can order beer, and coffee. I can say yes, no, and thank you. That’s it.”

“Not please?”

“Oh yes. And I can say ‘the daughters of the Rhine are lamenting the loss of their gold.’ That’s pretty useful.”

“Oh, vital. I would never have got through the war without that. Gosh, Wagner. There was a bloke who knew a bit about the passage of time.”

“He knew a lot about taking up other people’s time.”

“True, yes. But I mean all those layers of legend and history, ancient figures bound by an even more ancient past. Remarkable. And Parsifal. Eternal life from the sacrament, and Amfortas with that wound that won’t heal. What a mind. They’re doing Parsifal here, you know, for Easter. We might be able to find some returns somewhere.”

“I can’t see Elspeth sitting through four hours of Wagner. She’s not really a fan. Actually I’m not all that keen myself, just now. Wagner was such a miserable bugger. I want something mindless. Bit of Mozart. . .”

“Oh, blasphemy!”